Brown ink line drawing of a vertical interlaced knotwork design with two stylised beast heads at the top, suitable as a tattoo flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Interlaced knotwork with two beast heads

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a tall vertical band of interlaced ribbon-like strands that weave over and under each other, with two stylised beast or dragon heads with open jaws at the top. Spirals and small ring motifs appear at the base and along the sides. The linework is a uniform, even brown outline with no shading, and the design fills a narrow portrait composition on a plain white background.

Knotwork Interlace Dragon Spiral Ring Serpent

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The yew hedge at the bottom of our lawn had grown into itself the winter my father stopped coming down the garden, and by March nobody could tell where one branch ended and the next began. Mother called it a tangle and wanted it gone. I called it the serpent, because at the top, where a careless hand had clipped it years before, two shoots had thickened into heads with open jaws, one facing east and one facing west, as if they had been arguing across the gap for a century and had only just run out of breath.

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I went at it with the long shears on a Saturday, sleeves rolled, and the first strand I cut bled sap the colour of weak tea. Underneath, the branches ran over and under each other in long loops, so tightly knotted that cutting one only pulled another tighter. At the base, where the roots met the old flagstones, the growth curled into spirals like bindweed left to its own devices, and in the soil around them I found a ring of pale snail shells laid out in a neat circle, as though someone had counted them and found them all present. Mrs Ashdown from the cottage said her grandmother used to leave bread there for the thing that lived in the hedge, and that it always ate it.

I stopped with the shears half open. The heads were still watching me, and I found I did not have the nerve to finish. Instead I tied a length of red wool around the nearest jaw, a loose bow that would rot off by summer, and went inside to tell my mother the hedge would stay for another year.

It did. The rhubarb grows well in its shade now, and every spring I leave a crust on the flagstone for whatever is still living in the knot.